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Friday, January 11, 2013

UPDATE: SB 1. Easy to remember. Easy to say no and Harold Levy seminar. « Fred Klonsky

Back story to the Harold Levy seminar. « Fred Klonsky:


SB 1. Easy to remember. Easy to say no.

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Senate Bill 1.
Democratic Senate President John Cullerton says, “Hang ‘em all and we’ll figure out who is guilty later.”
Senate Bill 1 combines his forced choice pension grab, (Force pensioners to choose between cost of living raises or health care) and Nekritz’s- Oh, everything else bad you can think of.
Thanks to Cullerton, we retirees don’t have to keep remembering what the number of the bill is.
It’s #1.
Easy.
Cullerton’s legal theory is that if you pass ‘em both, the courts will figure out which one is legal.


Teachers in revolt.

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English teacher Kit McCormick, left, discusses Garfield High School teachers’ decision to refuse to give the MAP test to their students, during a Thursday news conference.
Teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to refuse to give the district mandated Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test to their students.
It’s a first.
The teachers’ statement:

            “Our teachers have come together and agree that the MAP test is not good for our students, nor is it an appropriate or useful tool in measuring 



Back story to the Harold Levy seminar.

I posted the invitation to the Harold Levy seminar previously. There is a back story.
On his blog, Schooling in the Ownership SocietyBrother Mike provides:
It was Levy, in a NYT piece back in 2009, while working for Citigroup, who offered us his “5 ways to fix schools.”  At that time, I wrote,
Levy, who obviously hadn’t yet discovered the 5 ways while he was still in power, now wants to make it “mandatory” that all kids go to college for a year. I suppose he hopes that will keep them out of the job market and off the unemployment line for a while longer and hopes that the feds will pick up the cost of tuition ($8,000 average for state colleges and $25,000 for private). As for those kids who want to take a year off after high school, to work or travel? I suppose we could arrest their parents. How will this “fix” schools? Maybe Levy will tell us later.
Levy helped funnel $500K of DFER money to Shapton.